All of which is just expanding on my point. Scientist don't program and don't care about software engineering and best practices, as you say, they don't have time for it. Also, a lot of what they create isn't intended to live for a long time, it's often put together as fast as possible for the use in a single (or a small set of) experiment. The problem comes when those one-off programs mutate into larger programs that somebody then decides they can make money off by selling to other scientists.
They'll sell it if and when there's a market for it and money to be made. Selling something isn't entirely free, so they need to know that they'll get a return for the investment of time and money. So no, they don't look like idiots, they look like businessmen.
Related is that the audience for most tools is so narrow that there's no commercial market for it. Even where there is some commercial market (e.g. statistical analysis software) the software produced, while powerful, is still often not that good or easy to use, and really expensive.
It's a simple problem, research software are either written by scientists that don't program or programmers who don't understand the science. So either you end up with a powerful and technically correct software that has an interface that is completely cryptic, confusing and generally unusable or you get a nice glossy looking software that doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
As the GP said, hydrogen oxide would be the most correct term (other than water). Any chemist knows the oxidation state of oxygen and knows how many hydrogen ions you'd need to make a stable molecule from it. You should use the simplest unambiguous name.
Not really a waste of time, the MSDS has more than just safety data, it also has physical data (e.g. boiling point, melting point). Of course, if you don't know the boiling point of water, you should probably step away from the chemistry bench. So really, it's only next to useless.
Thank you. As a chemist, I often have to fight the urge to punch somebody in the face when they say "dihydrogen monoxide" or similar nonsense names for water. Don't use your own ignorance to try and illustrate somebody else's.
And you're an idiot if you think I'm going to give away by abandonware or obsolete video games to just anybody who wants them. What's in it for me? Maybe it works in whatever fantasy world you live in.
Myspace could try to reinvent itself as a simple, open platform that promises not to make their service an ad-serving platform.
So in other words, completely remove all revenue generating capabilities and turn it into a massive black hole for the owners cash. Where do I submit my bid?
Companies exist to make money, what's the business case for open sourcing your failed products? Quite apart from all the other issues with proprietary pieces of technology that you might still be using, the fact that you might yourself resurrect a project if the market for it changes, and the fact you'd rather you competitors keep guessing about exactly how advanced you are.
Actually, I'd say when a company collapses, government regulation is the only way customers (and investors and creditors) are going to have any hope of protection. That's why we have bankruptcy laws in the first place. The free market can't regulate a company that has collapsed, it has nothing to lose. What's going to happen? Another company is going to out compete it at collapsing?
That's a bullshit attitude. Why should some non-technical person even think that their phone might be tagging their photos with location information. It's far from obvious and far from intuitive. If your technology requires that much effort to understand it's a failure of your technology, not your users. It's attitudes like yours that leads to unusable nonsense such as...well...Linux ; )
During a presentation at the computer security conference Source Boston, Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs and Larry Pesce, a senior security consultant with NWN, described the way photos taken by many phones are routinely encoded with latitude and longitude tags.
Emphasis mine. So there goes your "non-identifying" researchers.
To make people aware of the dangers of this data, Jackson and Pesce launched a site called I Can Stalk U, which searches Twitter for posts that reveal location information and creates a map pinpointing the places where pictures were taken. "We wanted to inform people of what they're really posting," Jackson says.
So you can go look for yourself. Maybe they can find you head by the geotagged photos you took up you own ass?
Doubt you'd find even 1 person out of 100 that knows what EXIF data is anyway, they're far too busy tweeting about their picture collection and posting it for the world to see anyway, they don't have time to be concerned about such trivial things as privacy anymore.
I think you're being a little unfair there. It's not that they aren't concerned, it's that they don't even know that they don't even know what EXIF is.
Yes, but getting a computer program to recognize the Eiffel Tower in a photo is a lot harder that writing a program to just read the geotagging data. And as others have already pointed out, not all pictures contain obvious location cues, but all geotagged photos do.
Slashdot Mirror
Well...duh!
All of which is just expanding on my point. Scientist don't program and don't care about software engineering and best practices, as you say, they don't have time for it. Also, a lot of what they create isn't intended to live for a long time, it's often put together as fast as possible for the use in a single (or a small set of) experiment. The problem comes when those one-off programs mutate into larger programs that somebody then decides they can make money off by selling to other scientists.
They'll sell it if and when there's a market for it and money to be made. Selling something isn't entirely free, so they need to know that they'll get a return for the investment of time and money. So no, they don't look like idiots, they look like businessmen.
Related is that the audience for most tools is so narrow that there's no commercial market for it. Even where there is some commercial market (e.g. statistical analysis software) the software produced, while powerful, is still often not that good or easy to use, and really expensive.
It's a simple problem, research software are either written by scientists that don't program or programmers who don't understand the science. So either you end up with a powerful and technically correct software that has an interface that is completely cryptic, confusing and generally unusable or you get a nice glossy looking software that doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
It's really hard to find people who can do both.
As the GP said, hydrogen oxide would be the most correct term (other than water). Any chemist knows the oxidation state of oxygen and knows how many hydrogen ions you'd need to make a stable molecule from it. You should use the simplest unambiguous name.
But that box? It's made of......chemicals!!!! Argghhhghghgh!!!!
Not really a waste of time, the MSDS has more than just safety data, it also has physical data (e.g. boiling point, melting point). Of course, if you don't know the boiling point of water, you should probably step away from the chemistry bench. So really, it's only next to useless.
Case in point, no, just no.
Thank you. As a chemist, I often have to fight the urge to punch somebody in the face when they say "dihydrogen monoxide" or similar nonsense names for water. Don't use your own ignorance to try and illustrate somebody else's.
And you're an idiot if you think I'm going to give away by abandonware or obsolete video games to just anybody who wants them. What's in it for me? Maybe it works in whatever fantasy world you live in.
Myspace could try to reinvent itself as a simple, open platform that promises not to make their service an ad-serving platform.
So in other words, completely remove all revenue generating capabilities and turn it into a massive black hole for the owners cash. Where do I submit my bid?
Why? Because they have a HUGE stick up their @ss about someone else using their property.
And why shouldn't they? Also, do you mind if I borrow your car and crash on your couch for a few months?
Companies exist to make money, what's the business case for open sourcing your failed products? Quite apart from all the other issues with proprietary pieces of technology that you might still be using, the fact that you might yourself resurrect a project if the market for it changes, and the fact you'd rather you competitors keep guessing about exactly how advanced you are.
What we need is a way to insert ads into your dreams.
In that the government bailed them out.
Actually, I'd say when a company collapses, government regulation is the only way customers (and investors and creditors) are going to have any hope of protection. That's why we have bankruptcy laws in the first place. The free market can't regulate a company that has collapsed, it has nothing to lose. What's going to happen? Another company is going to out compete it at collapsing?
What you have on YOUR hard drive, on YOUR dvds, YOUR tapes is in YOUR control. Note that it is not necessarily better.
Not if the RIAA, MPAA and others have their way./p.
That's a bullshit attitude. Why should some non-technical person even think that their phone might be tagging their photos with location information. It's far from obvious and far from intuitive. If your technology requires that much effort to understand it's a failure of your technology, not your users. It's attitudes like yours that leads to unusable nonsense such as...well...Linux ; )
Most of mine start with "hello"
Did you even bother to read TFA?
Emphasis mine. So there goes your "non-identifying" researchers.
So you can go look for yourself. Maybe they can find you head by the geotagged photos you took up you own ass?
Doubt you'd find even 1 person out of 100 that knows what EXIF data is anyway, they're far too busy tweeting about their picture collection and posting it for the world to see anyway, they don't have time to be concerned about such trivial things as privacy anymore.
I think you're being a little unfair there. It's not that they aren't concerned, it's that they don't even know that they don't even know what EXIF is.
Yes, but getting a computer program to recognize the Eiffel Tower in a photo is a lot harder that writing a program to just read the geotagging data. And as others have already pointed out, not all pictures contain obvious location cues, but all geotagged photos do.
Considering the proportion of people that have been on 4chan versus the general population, that's not particularly helpful.
Dude, your comment was EPIC!